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Adventures in Waste and Recycling – Creating Value

The Challenge

Trying to put a value on the global waste market is difficult, but looking at one country can help to give a sense of scale: in India alone, waste is a two billion US dollars industry. The percentage of waste recycled varies wildly from country to country and from region to region. The ability to recycle waste depends at the very least on political will, municipal financial ability, societal awareness, and the established infrastructure to support those efforts.

The fiasco of Naples in the hot summer months of 2008 in addition to the spectre of New York City’s garbage ships traversing the ocean searching for a dump or incinerator, and the piles of electric waste smouldering on the shores of Ghana, mean that reducing the amount of garbage that ends up in landfills or in incinerators is critical to future health of the planet. What are the unique approaches and innovative ways that some companies have designed to make opportunities out of waste? How can recycling and composting be made easier for the huge urban populations across the globe? In moving towards a circular economy, where is Extended Producer Responsibility required or how do we put in place proper product stewardship?

Proposals

Global exchange of good practices for resource recovery based on local lifestyle, such as cascade usage, integrated green design, cross-boarder cooperation and properly designed indicators will bring ...

Global exchange of good practices for resource recovery based on local lifestyle, such as cascade usage, integrated green design, cross-boarder cooperation and properly designed indicators will bring us to a better sustainable material management world. The resource recovery of post consumer goods had been elevated as one of the most important societal and economical issue in many countries after the global resource shortage and price skyrocketing for almost a decade. Meanwhile, the resource recovery policies implemented in EU and other countries since 1990 already provided us handful practical tools, such as policy guidelines, market practices, technology applications and channels for

TIME FOR A PARADIGM SHIFT It is time for a fundamental shift in how nations address waste. Environmental concerns and the concept of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) are less than perfectly effe ...

TIME FOR A PARADIGM SHIFT It is time for a fundamental shift in how nations address waste. Environmental concerns and the concept of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) are less than perfectly effective at driving solutions to the waste problem: they ignore fundamental truths about what the real problems are and how the world works. Approaching waste management as an environmental problem is like treating symptoms instead of the disease. The more fundamental problem is that waste represents resource consumption that the world can increasingly ill afford. Resources are coming under increasing pressure, commodity prices are rising, and we have to

Background Paper

Negative environmental impacts are symptoms, not the disease. The core problem is that we are squandering resources at an unsustainable rate. We are consuming resources instead of using them, where � ...

Negative environmental impacts are symptoms, not the disease. The core problem is that we are squandering resources at an unsustainable rate. We are consuming resources instead of using them, where “consuming” means using once and then having nothing of value left, and “using” means applying a resource to a purpose and then still having that resource.

Virtual Library

Mankind has long possessed the notion of rarity, and recognised the limited nature of its resources compared with the extent of its needs. Everything available had to be used and nothing – or prac ...

Mankind has long possessed the notion of rarity, and recognised the limited nature of its resources compared with the extent of its needs. Everything available had to be used and nothing – or practically nothing – was ever discarded. However, the Industrial Revolution obliged mankind to adopt a new rationale, that of exploitation, predatory behaviour and the consumption of resources, whether sustainable or not, with no apparent limits. Gradually waste became regarded as pollution and had to be collected, hidden or buried, with minimum impact on the environment. However, at the beginning of the 21st century, the world experienced a series of shocks affecting as much the natural resources markets as the climatic and environmental equilibrium of our planet. The explosion of prices in world markets in 2008 impacted economies reaching their limits as much in demo- graphic as physical and biological terms. Rarity had suddenly returned to centre stage of our concerns. Mankind had now collect, sort, recover and recycle, and in a word, get back to the ancient ideal of closing the material cycle loop by transforming waste into material resources. Waste management had been a matter of proximity for a long time, and tended to be perceived in a caricatural manner in its environmental pollution reduction task. Today it is becoming the increasingly world-wide problem of managing resource supplies exploited for the energy and materials they provide. The increase in world flows of scrap and recovered cellulose fibres and plastics has turned the developed countries of the northern hemisphere into a source of supply, one which those in southern hemisphere are now beginning to exploit. This is inducing new problems of interdependence between north and south. The 2009 World Waste Panorama study is the result of collaboration between Veolia Environmental Services , world No.1 in the waste management, recovery and recycling domain, and CyclOpe , the leading European research institute in the area of raw material and commodity markets. The study has been produced by Catherine Gaillochet, a legal expert specialising in environmental law, under the direction of Philippe Chalmin, Professor with the Paris-Dauphine University and Chairman of CyclOpe.